How bathroom reading can improve your life 10x in only 3 minutes — Daily fiber for the mind!
Many years back before the Internet… well before life began. A British professor who was managing a nature preserve in Texas told me you can learn anything you’ll ever need in that place. He was pointing at the Google of our day… a public library, and his name was Dr. Geoffrey Stanford. An aged, lanky, eccentric professor with white hair had just woken me up to fact that I didn’t need college to make a life for myself. I was 16 and I had just barely completed the equivalency of high-school in England. Since that time and without the resources of the internet I have come up with my own path for success.
I read at a horribly slow pace. I constantly feel like I have to whip my easily distracted brain to be able to digest the information I’m reading. Nonetheless! In lieu of going to college I decided that if I was to get anywhere in life I needed to expand my knowledge. For more than two decades I’ve been reading books with the brain of a monkey on too much caffeine. So how do I do it effectively?
First, to accommodate my monkey-like attention span I had to get creative. I decided to adopt the principles that TV producers know and use so effectively. They understand that to keep me glued to the TV they need to change the scene within 3 seconds. Ok… so reading for only 3 seconds won’t exactly do much for self-improvement, but this process made me remember why I liked picture books when I was 3 years old. So I decided that I would read for 30 minutes a day. Good goal, but difficult to maintain. What about 3 minutes a day I thought. Better yet, how about 3 pages a day. Great… so what’s next?
At first I tried to read books in chronological order… Introduction… chapter 1… yawn… fail! Then I started just flipping to the center of the book and started reading. These were self-help books. So who cares about building a plot. I quickly found that using this method was more helpful. Most often I was hooked and if I wasn’t… I’d flip to another section and start reading! If I flipped around and the content of the book didn’t suck me in… I wouldn’t purchase the book. If a book didn’t provide value within 30 seconds of reading it, I didn’t purchase it. I don’t care about the book forward, or who the author was grateful to! I want value for me. So how do I continue to keep my chimpanzee-style attention?
Early on I figured out that I have an interest in many different subjects. So… why just purchase and read a single book at a time. Heck my brain can handle watching 2 or 3 episodes of a TV series…. then in the middle of a TV series it can go out and watch a movie… then some how it has time to take in a good Discovery channel documentary… all before returning to watch another TV episode of the series it was watching last week. What an amazing brain! Who says you have to read one book before you can start another. Diversify! Your brain can handle it. I buy 3–4 books at a time. I keep them all around me. I put one in the bedroom, one in my car, one in my living room, and finally my favorite place, the bathroom. Now I’ll never have an excuse for not reading 3 pages a day because I didn’t remember to bind a book to my hip. Ah ha… Monkey-brain foiled! So how well does this translate to knowledge improvement?
Good question! Assuming you read 3 pages a day while succumbing to nature in my favorite place.. x 30 days… x 12 months translates to roughly the equivalent of ten x 100 page books a year. That’s a great amount of improvement within 1 year for sitting the bathroom. Imagine how smart you’d be if you did this for the next 5 years… the average time it takes for a college student to complete a degree. Cost? That’s 50 books @ an average cost of $30 each. Total $1,500. Now I’m not saying that you’ll have a college education by this time, but you would certainly have a lot less debt… and you wouldn’t have to study Statistics… YUK! (unless of course you really wanted to torture yourself)
In addition to the numerous books I’ve studied on Information Technology with which I’ve made my career to date… I’ve diversified my reading to include many types of subjects including Sales, Marketing, Finance, Accounting, Economics, Negotiation, Management, Leadership, Real Estate, Psychology, Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior, as well as many other disciplines. Although some of these books might seam boring at first glance, remember that we’re only looking for books that can immediately grab your attention. Otherwise, move on! None of these books have to be your typical boring college-approved course-ware. In today’s world there are many authors who can really liven up a seemingly tedious subject with great antidotes that really bring the subject to life and engage the reader.
Think of reading these 3 pages as your daily fiber for the mind… Happy Poop Education!